


cut both ways

by fathomfive



Category: Bleach
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Ichimaru Gin lives, mentions of suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24496903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: Gin loses his job the same way he got it: very quickly, and with a lot of blood. And because today just isn't going to plan, the two people he least wanted to see catch up with him shortly after.(Or, Gin survives his attempt on Aizen and makes sure everyone regrets it, including himself. Featuring bad jokes, worse speeches, and cruelties of various kinds.)
Relationships: Ichimaru Gin & Kira Izuru, Ichimaru Gin & Matsumoto Rangiku
Comments: 6
Kudos: 65





	cut both ways

Gin took one and a half steps past Aizen, put his fingers on Kyouka Suigetsu’s blade, and stopped thinking about possible futures.

“I’ll take care of the kids,” he said. He spun Kamishini no Yari in his other hand. Aizen began to say his name, which was exactly the last thing he wanted right then. He took a deep breath and tendered his resignation.

Aizen made a wet, shocked noise as the blade went through. The caustic soup of his reiatsu shuddered all around them, and Gin’s ears popped. He made himself look back.

He’d had more than a hundred years to come up with something really clever to say in this moment. But Aizen’s burning eyes were fixed on him, and he was still trying to speak, even while the poison ate through. Gin did not want to be clever. He wanted to be somewhere far away, and done.

He put a hand out for the exposed Hogyouku. Aizen’s reiatsu flared and dipped precipitously, and in the dip Gin felt the kidou he’d laid on Rangiku burn clean away. In its place, two familiar presences shone dimly, like lamps through a fog.

Aizen’s eyes moved a little. He’d felt them too. Gin grabbed the Hogyouku and ran for it.

He wasn’t fast enough to stop Aizen taking a chunk out of his arm—but that was hardly any price at all, and worse pain had never stopped him. He bolted over the rooftops until his breath was all gone, and skidded to a halt in an alley between an apartment block and an all-night video store.

He looked down at his hand. His boss’ ticket to godhood sat stickily in his palm. His fingers were already going numb after just a few moments of exposure to the Hogyouku, and he flexed them curiously. They didn’t tremble, but they also didn’t feel like they belonged to him.

He’d seen the thing plenty of times, but this was the first time he’d touched it. In this moment he could not imagine making it do anything. It felt like the instant he relaxed his grip, it would drink him until he was empty.

 _It’s over_ , he said to himself. It sounded like a lie. He leaned around the mouth of the alley, and stretched his senses to see what his erstwhile overlord was up to.

The power that rolled out to meet him was like a blow to the face, and it came with a light and a wind and a howl like all hell. The vibration sang through his teeth to the center of his bones. Bleak recognition settled over him—a well-worn coat, by now. It was never just one thing with Aizen. He was a nesting doll of successive awfulnesses. All things considered, Gin would have been surprised to look out of the alley and _not_ see him levitating over the rooftops at the center of a searing column of light.

He was shattering and peeling and bursting, changing form. He was laughing, or maybe howling—some noise of ecstasy for which the distinction didn’t seem important. Also, he had wings.

Gin had a contingency plan for this, which was to run in one direction and point his sword in the other. He didn’t get the chance. Aizen was gone from his place in the sky, and then he was right there, facing Gin in the mouth of the alley. Asphalt and buildings shattered with a _whomp_ , in a perfect hundred-yard ring of destruction.

“Oh, Gin,” he said.

The place where the Hogyouku had been was an emptiness, crisscrossed by filaments of—Gin didn’t actually want to know what it was. They spun and tangled, reaching for each other. It was magnetically unpleasant.

“You must have realized by now,” Aizen said, “that that was remarkably shortsighted of you.”

He was trying to sound kindly and knowing, because he knew Gin hated it. But his voice had started going wrong around the same time his skin and hair and eyes had started doing—whatever they were doing. He looked like a marble statue with things moving around under the surface. He sounded like six Aizens speaking all together from inside his chest. There was another eye coming open on his forehead. Gin wondered if he’d even noticed.

“Yeah?” he said, because talking was the one skill that had never deserted him. “You know I hate to disappoint y—”

Aizen advanced exactly one step and his reiatsu began frying the moisture off Gin’s eyeballs. His lungs were shriveling. He couldn’t pull air in through his throat. It was not conducive to a conversation. But then again, Aizen didn’t want to have a conversation. He wanted to talk.

“If removing the Hogyouku was going to stop me,” Aizen said, “it would have happened already. It belongs to me now, wholly and completely.” As if on cue, the Hogyouku swooped out of Gin’s hand and into the pit of Aizen’s chest. It settled in among the grasping filaments, and glowed in a way that seemed satisfied.

“I have evolved beyond mere physical dependency,” Aizen went on, with the air of someone who had spent two hundred years pretending not to be a towering asshole and was now making up for lost time. “And I,” he lifted a foot, stepped delicately over the asphalt that had shattered at his landing, “am done,” he raised a hand, “with you.”

Gin whipped Kamishini no Yari into the meat of his shoulder. With his right hand he reached for the Hogyouku again. This time, Aizen did not make a sound as the blade cut into him. He closed his hand around Gin’s wrist, with none of the gentleness he’d played at in years past, and pulled until Gin and his right arm became violently divorced.

It had amused Aizen to be gentle, once upon a time. He had tried it on Gin in the early days of their acquaintance, while he was still working out if Gin was the kind of child who would respond well to a fond touch from a sympathetic adult. Thankfully for the both of them, Gin was a horrible Rukongai creature and would not tolerate that kind of behavior. But Aizen had gotten his kicks in other places. He was telling himself a secret joke, every time he cupped the back of Hinamori’s head or gave a subordinate a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

Now, Gin watched his arm sail across the street, and reflected that he knew Aizen _way_ too well.

Aizen raised his sword arm. Dizzy with the pain, Gin had just enough presence of mind to note that it didn’t feel like Kyouka Suigetsu any more. It just felt like more Aizen, the way a hollow’s claw was just an extra sharp bit of a hollow. Like his crushing presence was melting his zanpakutou down, gulping it back into the soul from which it had sprung.

By now Gin’s threshold for unsettling Aizen things was so high it was stratospheric, but apparently some things could still put him off.

The blade went in. Gin was just ready enough to clench his jaw instead of screaming, and he bit down so hard that something in his mouth went _crack_. The blade came out. A lot of Gin came with it. Kamishini no Yari slipped from his hand, and went back under seal like a drowner sliding into the sea.

“Not a sound,” Aizen said, watching with mild interest as Gin crumpled onto the asphalt. “I’m almost impressed. But then again, you always did like to suffer in silence.”

Gin lay there and demonstrated the point. He had spent a hundred years and more, his entire adult life, not saying _nothing you make is gonna last, I will tear it all down, one day I’ll put my sword through your fake-fatherly eyes and laugh about it_. At some point he’d crushed the words down so hard that it became impossible to say them at all, difficult even to think them. And now there was no point.

“To tell the truth, I’m grateful to you,” Aizen said. “The threat of death hones us, makes us sharp. It’s because of you that I was able...”

His voice was fading away. Gin wanted to tell him that since he was busy bleeding to death, he could not hear the monologue. But talking was a distant dream just then. He stared up at the slice of sky visible between the buildings. Black spots were swelling in his vision.

Aizen intruded on the view eventually. He was smiling down at Gin with what he probably thought was a fatherly expression. Joke was on him, he had a nightmare face now and he would never again be able to smile the smile that made Gin’s skin crawl.

“You’ve served me well,” he said. “I almost wish you could see what I’m going to become.”

Then he drifted away over the rubble of the street, serene and empty-eyed and utterly pretentious. Gin tried to move his head, found that he still could, and turned it to watch Aizen’s back recede. For the first time in a hundred years, the view was absent that pleasant little thrill of hatred.

Maybe he’d gotten a bit too hooked on that feeling.

Aizen got most of the way down the block before the Kurosaki kid showed up. The Kurosaki kid was also serene and empty-eyed, and Gin couldn’t feel his presence at all, which either meant that Gin really was dying, or something unexpected had happened, or both. Kurosaki was a nesting doll of improbabilities. From the look on his face, someone had cracked him open again to reveal the next insane party favor. Maybe this time it would even work.

While they talked, Gin dragged his fingers across the ground until he felt his sword. He closed his hand around it. He dragged it back to his side. It all seemed to take several years. Slowly, and with a force of will he sort of wished he didn’t have, he dragged his tattered energy into his core and began heaving himself upright, with Shinsou for a crutch.

His vertebrae protested from the separate territories they had seceded to. Several times the world receded entirely and a shrill ringing sound took its place. He clamped his torn muscles together with a vindictive twist of spiritual energy, and focused on not screaming.

Aizen and Kurosaki were still talking. The conversation didn’t seem productive. Then Rangiku came around the corner, and Gin’s vision tunneled.

When the world came back, he was standing in the street between Rangiku and Kurosaki and Aizen, and, whoa, there was a _lot_ of his blood in between here and where he’d been lying. Maybe most of it. His ex-arm was lying next to the telephone pole, curled up like a grub with its fingers bent.

“It was interesting,” Aizen sighed, “but now it’s just predictable.” He stepped forward and Gin swayed, trying to figure out the best direction to topple in to get between him and Rangiku. And then Kurosaki Ichigo grabbed Aizen by the face, and flung them both over the horizon to parts unknown.

The look on Aizen’s face almost convinced Gin to slip the cruel bonds of existence right then and there. Nothing could top that, unless Kurosaki would oblige him by coming back and doing it again. He grinned emptily at the spot where they had been standing.

“Gin,” Rangiku said, “sit the hell down.”

He met her eyes. They were puffy and red, and that was his fault. She was very pale. He settled his stance, testing his balance. He was a walking act of butchery held together by strings of his own reiryoku, but he probably wasn’t going to fall over and embarrass himself in front of her. At least, not in the next three seconds. After that it was anyone’s guess.

“Gin,” Rangiku said. “I’m only going to say it one more time. Sit the hell down.”

When he just looked at her, she drew her sword. She swayed where she stood, arms trembling.

“Or what?” he said quietly.

Something flicked across his cheek. It was nothing in addition to the rest of the pain, but his head dropped onto his chest, and his balance deserted him with startling speed. _Us_ , Rangiku had said.

“Please,” Izuru said from behind him. Unfailingly polite, Izuru was. But right now, despite the _please_ , it did not sound like he was asking.

Gin put his thumb on Shinsou’s guard. He considered the situation. Rangiku had just spent the last twenty minutes on the brink of death; she was sweating bullets. Izuru had probably burned himself out helping put her intestines back. Maybe being short an arm would make him faster.

Yeah, right.

Something moved in his periphery. He dodged on instinct, a blade whiffing past his other cheek. On the backstep he understood what it was, and what was going to happen to him.

Izuru moved in again, the hooked blade of his shikai held in guard position. He did not look well. He looked like he had a fever, dead pale with two spots of high color burning on his cheeks. He looked like a man who knew the weight of his own sins to the microgram, and had resolved to add to the pile. As soon as Gin processed that, Izuru darted in again and whipped Wabisuke across his collarbone.

It was a shallow cut. Izuru only ever needed a shallow cut. Gin staggered back. Izuru’s advance was only slightly more graceful, but he had the advantage of most of his blood still being inside his body where it belonged, and his heart also, probably, still where it was supposed to be. If it wasn’t, he was doing a damn fine job going on anyway.

“You know how this works,” Izuru said. “You should just kneel now.”

“Sure you don’t wanna ease up?” Gin panted. “You’re not looking so good.”

Izuru’s face did something complicated and highly amusing. Gin wondered, not for the first time, if Izuru had what it took to kill him.

Wabisuke’s near corner split the skin of Gin’s temple, and Gin’s head dropped so fast he thought it’d pop right off his neck and roll away. He stared at his feet, at the mess of him on the ground—he’d lost a shoe at some point. He hadn’t noticed. Behind him, Rangiku’s hands were moving, and she was chanting an incantation under her breath.

Izuru advanced again, and cut him right across the shoulder. Gin went down on his knees.

He lifted his chin as far as he could, which wasn’t very far. He moved his eyes the rest of the way, until he could just see his old lieutenant, chin and mouth and nose and the flicker of his pale eyes. Kidou flashed in his periphery. He jerked upright, locked in place by the six beams of Rangiku’s binding, and made a small involuntary noise of agony.

“Ow,” he said. “Playing kind of rough, Rangiku.”

“Don’t start,” she said wearily. “In fact, I think you’d better not talk at all.”

Gin had no intention of staying quiet, because the two people he’d come closest to trusting in his life were here in front of him, and just maybe, if he said the right thing, he could annoy them into killing him. He opened his mouth, and just ended up coughing wetly; one or both of his lungs had said to hell with it and were trying to jump ship. His ears rang.

Izuru watched him intently. A minute ago he had looked as though he might cry, but now his gaze was fierce and glassy. Gin had spent a lot of their acquaintance wondering what it’d take to make him snap and do something really funny, like set the barracks on fire or submit a public rant to the editorial section of the Bulletin. But instead he had spent his time writing heartfelt poetry and letting his friends give him noogies.

He wasn’t going to snap now either, Gin could tell. He really had come a long way.

Gin took the deepest breath he could manage against the glowing restraints, and lifted his chin. Izuru regarded him. He swung Wabisuke down off his shoulder. Then he sealed his shikai, and knelt in the shattered street.

He put one hand on Gin’s chest and the other on the ruin of his arm, and healing kidou began to flow into the wounds. Gin understood then that Izuru did have what it took to kill him, and that he wasn’t going to do it. The thought gripped what was left of his insides like a fist. He swung his head involuntarily until he could see Rangiku.

Rangiku moved past them. She was going to the human kids. She held his gaze as she went, and her look was long and cool and sad.

The kids and that one guy from the Thirteenth were quivering in the alley—they had somehow managed to survive Aizen’s burst of power. The kids were young, with the soft fuzzy-edged souls of humans who had never had anything really bad happen to them. They felt so foreign that it was hard to believe that he’d been like that once. Theoretically. Highly theoretically. He only ever remembered being shorter and more terrified, but even back then, his soul was folded steel.

Why did he remember that so well?

 _Maybe_ , a voice in the back of his head said, _because_ _it’s been a hundred years but you’ve only ever had one reason for doing anything._

When Rangiku finished checking on the humans, she staggered back over and sat down on a chunk of curbing. Izuru turned toward her, and they had some kind of wordless conversation Gin could only see her half of. She made a series of conflicted faces, and eventually she glanced down the street, to where his arm was lying.

Izuru followed her gaze. “No way,” he said. “Even if I was running hot, there’s no way I could put that back on. That’s advanced Fourth stuff.”

There was a prolonged silence. No one brought up the fact that if the Fourth got its hands on Gin, that meant the rest of the Gotei 13 would have too, and that reattaching his arm would be a weird cosmetic choice since his head would be coming off shortly after.

“I’ll do without,” Gin said graciously, and hawked blood down the front of his robe.

Rangiku and Izuru whirled on him in unison. “ _Quiet_ ,” they said. Rangiku pinched the bridge of her nose. “I mean it, Gin,” she said. “Now’s not the time.”

“Don’ see why not,” Gin panted. “Maybe I have things to say.”

Rangiku’s face pinched up. “I gave you a chance to speak,” she said. He could see the effort of will it was taking her to keep her voice even. His heart redoubled its efforts to shove all of his blood out of his body. “You didn’t say anything.”

“You put me on the spot,” he said. “You know how I get under pressure.”

He was spared from seeing what her face did next because Izuru, bless him, chose that moment to jam his fingers into Gin’s chest wound like he was digging for change in the couch cushions.

“This might get a bit painful,” he said, while Gin doubled over and wheezed. “Sorry. I need to get right up in there for this part.”

“Izuru,” Gin panted, after what was either fifteen seconds or several hours, “feeling vindictive?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Izuru said dully.

“All right,” Rangiku said. “Sure. Fine. Since you’re feeling talkative for once, why don’t you clear some things up for me?” She wiped her forehead with her scarf and stared at him. Time advanced excruciatingly slowly. “You turned on him,” she said. “We saw you do it. What the hell was that? What was—any of this?”

“Could be it’s just in my nature,” he said.

“Step on the snake,” she said, “and the snake rears up. I know how it goes.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “You really expect me to believe that?”

“Nah,” he said easily. “’S not in _your_ nature.”

“Like you know what my nature is,” she said.

“Don’t I?” he said.

She looked away from him. On the other side of the street, the humans were hunkered behind the barrier she had cast. It jutted from the half-ruined wall of a convenience store, bisecting an advertisement for limited edition melon ice cream bars. The lights inside stuttered on-off, on-off.

“Is there any point in my asking why?” Rangiku said.

Gin tilted a shoulder in as much of a shrug as he could manage. “Nah,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Izuru repeated.

“Doesn’t _matter_ ,” Rangiku repeated, with sixty percent less sadness and eighty percent more furious disbelief.

Gin worked his mouth around, wobbling a loosened tooth. He breathed slowly through his nose. He swallowed. “I couldn’t get back what he took from you anyway,” he said.

He said it looking slightly sideways and at the ground, because he had only ever claimed to be a snake, not a brave person. He studied the ripped-up sidewalk. At least, he did until Rangiku got in the way.

She was close. She was much too close. “Gin,” she said. “Look at me.”

He began counting the cracks in the pavement. It was mostly cracks.

“Look at me,” she said again, quiet and brittle and dangerous, “and tell me what the hell you think I’m missing.”

Her tone of voice called on a long-ago part of him that could not refuse her. He raised his eyes a little.

The first thing he saw was Izuru, who was making a face that said he felt profoundly awkward and existentially tortured by his current circumstances. He was nothing if not consistent. Right now it was sort of comforting. Gin looked further.

He looked at Rangiku, who stood above him with swollen eyes and a sweaty forehead and the sun of Soul Society caught in her bright hair. There was still a little dried blood crusted around her nostrils and the corner of her mouth, but, as was obvious from the tear in her uniform, she would not die of the wound Ayon had given her. Hell, she had more of her bits in place than Gin did.

That was good. That was a relief, even if she looked like cussedness was the only thing keeping her upright. She didn’t like to work hard, but when it came down to cussedness she could keep going forever, like a small sun powered by endless fuck-you fusion. She’d be fine.

“What?” she said irritably, when he took too long to answer. “Say something, will you?”

Gin realized almost a minute had passed. Blood loss was making time curiously bendy. He kept on looking at her, looking at her, taking her in, the way he had not let himself do for decades. No matter how hard he looked, he could not see that she was missing anything.

If he’d looked sooner, maybe he would have noticed.

“Hah,” he said softly. And then: “Sorry, I blacked out for a second there. You say something?”

Rangiku’s fingers twitched. Izuru shut his eyes as if praying. “Gin, if I wasn’t down most of my blood and you weren’t down even more of your blood, I would knock you into next week,” Rangiku said.

“Small mercies,” Gin rasped.

“I’m working on the blood situation,” Izuru said.

“Reiatsu?” Rangiku said.

“Climbing,” Izuru said. “He finally passed the threshold for self-regeneration, at least.”

“Good,” Rangiku said grimly. She narrowed her eyes at Gin. “You’d better work up enough to make it back through the Dangai by yourself. We can’t have this pointing back to either of us. If they start asking questions, it’s all over.”

Gin blinked. He turned toward Izuru, who looked away. Rangiku was not quite looking at him either. And it turned out eye contact wasn’t even necessary, because the weight settled in on him anyway, as delicate and inexorable as Wabisuke’s power pinning his limbs.

“Ah,” he said, “and here I thought you guys were gonna do your duty.”

Izuru gave an unhappy yelp of laughter, and immediately looked startled at himself. “I don’t think you ever talked to me about duty,” he said. “Not once, when we were—”

“Should I have?” Gin said. “I didn’t think you needed it. I had you for the kind of guy who was trying all the time to do the right thing. I mean, I used to.” He smiled.

Izuru’s mouth opened a little, and his shoulders hunched. There was no surprise at all in his expression, just a crumpled sort of recognition. His hands stayed right where they were. He bent his focus on Gin’s wounds. He had to be running on fumes by now, but he kept on giving it up, unflinchingly.

“Thank you,” he said eventually. “I wanted to live up to your expectations.” He seemed to be telling himself a private joke too.

“He’s not surprised, Kira,” Rangiku said. She still wasn’t looking at either of them. “Don’t let him make you think he’s surprised.”

“Aw, but,” Gin said, “I almost am.”

And it was true. He had lived a whole life light, untouchable, always moving forward on the hunt. He’d left her, over and over again. Each time, he came back with his hands out, curious if this would be the last straw, and each time she placed forgiveness into them, over and over and over again.

In all that time he had never been able to put it down. It was the only thing he carried. It was heavy.

He started laughing, which was a bad choice and felt absolutely terrible. Izuru jerked away for a moment, startled, before his hands came back to the wounds.

“Stop that,” he said. “Stop it. You’re making it worse.”

“This’ll hold me together,” Gin said, crooking his fingers toward the binding. “Won’t it?” It would, it was Rangiku’s work, it would hold tight and he wouldn’t fall to pieces no matter what.

“Gin, shut up,” Rangiku said heavily. “You’ve always had the worst sense of humor.”

“You can’t tell me it’s not funny,” he said, while blood rolled down his chin. The joke was on him. Because his head felt so heavy, he lowered it down, as far as it would go, and grinned at the broken street under his knees.

**Author's Note:**

> Kira can hit his traitor boss with the Symbolic Guilt Sword, as a treat.
> 
> I'm reading Bleach for the first time in about 10 years, and it turns out that when it comes to Gin I will still bite the sympathy bait. only this time I will bite until something breaks


End file.
